As we round the corner into the final few days of the 2015 Berkshire Festival of Women Writers, I’ve been thinking a lot about labor.
Labor as in the gigantic labor of love that is our collaborative community Festival — collaboration being an asset that a big-tent, month-long, multi-venue event like ours simply could not do without.
Labor as in the fruits thereof, which are on display in the tremendous talent of all the women writers and performers participating in this year’s Festival.
Labor as in all the hard work that goes into making our homegrown Festival such a success — much of the essential tasks happening behind the scenes and out of sight, but no less valuable for their lack of visibility.
At last weekend’s Gutsy Gals Inspire Me Film Awards, I was especially struck by the way each of the women who received an award talked about how hard they had had to work, often for many years and with great determination, to complete their projects and see them through to distribution and the accolades that followed.
Behind every successful woman lie years and years of focused perseverance.
Success doesn’t magically happen — we have to make it happen, and what I’ve learned through my work with the Festival is that when we work together, we can tap into what I’ve taken to calling “the distributed energy model” of collaboration, which hooks the power of our network together to give a huge boost to each of our individual efforts.
It’s like the difference between a single soprano singing alone, and the full delivery of a hundred-voice chorus all singing in harmony. Although that’s not really an appropriate metaphor, because in a musical chorus we don’t distinguish individual voices, whereas in the Festival we have a chance to hear and appreciate each participant individually, while also gathering all those voices together into a full-throated celebration of women’s creative expression.
With the publication of our new Festival Anthology, Writing Fire: Celebrating the Power of Women’s Words, we are extending that collective reach even further out into the world.
The Anthology began with my idea of wanting to produce a book honoring and commemorating the outstanding women writers who have made the first five years of the Festival such a success. But as the book came together my co-editors and I realized that we had much more than a mere souvenir on our hands — the book is a moving and powerful channel for the kinds of stories that don’t often make it into print. With 69 contributors of all ages and many backgrounds, it represents the 
diversity that comes together under the Festival tent, and when you read it you will feel the love that made laboring on this collection such a pleasure.
We will be launching Writing Fire at the Festival Book Expo this coming Sunday, 3/29, with readings from some of the contributors and copies of the book for sale. The Expo features more than 90 vendors — authors, booksellers, publishing companies and artisans —
and will be kicked off by a very special interview with Mary Pope Osborne, author of The Magic Treehouse series and many other books for children and adults.
The day will conclude with a talk and book-signing by Sarah van Gelder, co-founder and Editor in Chief of YES! Magazine, who is joining us to talk about her new book, Sustainable Happiness. Imagine, if you can, the tremendous woman-power represented on this single day of the Festival!
The final weekend of the Festival brings yet another aspect women’s labor into the discussion: the labor of childbirth. Jayne Atkinson will be bringing Lisa Rafel’s play Can You Hear Me Baby? Stories of Sex, Love and OMG Birth! to life in three benefit performances at the Unicorn Theater on Friday and Saturday. The play is witty, wise, and once again offers the kind of stories and voices that we just don’t hear enough in the mainstream media.
In fact, I’ve been so struck with this topic of women and labor that I’ve got a call for submissions up on the Festival website now, seeking poetry, stories and personal narratives for a reading May 2 at the Sandisfield Arts Center, as well as for a new anthology to be published in 2016, with working title Strong Shoulders: The Loves and Labors of Women.
One of my favorite women writers, Aurora Levins Morales, wrote memorably (in an essay that I published in my first edited collection, Women Writing Resistance: Essays on Latin America and the Caribbean) that women’s work “is the work they decided to call unwork. The tasks as necessary as air,” and as taken for granted.
There is much more to be said about this, and I look forward to all the many passionate conversations that will undoubtedly be sparked by this year’s Festival and the Writing Fire anthology, as well as the Strong Shoulders anthology to come.
For now, join us as we celebrate and honor the magnificent labors that have gone into creating the Festival events on our homestretch of the month — at least one event every day through March 31. As Aurora Levin Morales says, women “are full of fire, dreams, pain and subversive laughter.” Come get a taste of the Festival magic. You won’t be disappointed.
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The weekly EDGE WISE column is curated by Jennifer Browdy, Ph.D., associate professor of comparative literature, gender studies and media studies at Bard College at Simon’s Rock and the Founding Director of the Berkshire Festival of Women Writers. Women writers interested in publishing in EDGE WISE can find writers’ guidelines on the Festival website, or may submit queries or columns to Jennifer@berkshirewomenwriters.org.
